With many California aquifers declining, calls grow for more oversight of groundwater

Jan. 10, 2014 10:58 AM

The Interlake Tunnel Project was deisgned to help abate increasing levels of seawater intrusion by restoring flow along the Salinas River and recharging the area's groundwater basins. / Jay Dunn/The Salinas Californian

Written by

Ian James, Valerie Gibbons and Dennis L. Taylor

About the project

In an investigation of groundwater depletion in California, Gannett newspapers in the state — The Desert Sun, the Visalia Times-Delta/Tulare Advance Register and The Salinas Californian — teamed up to collect data and analyze the problem. Data for 3,054 wells were obtained from a U.S. Geological Survey database, while records for 340 wells were provided by the Coachella Valley Water District and the Desert Water Agency. The measurements of groundwater levels between 2000 and 2013 were analyzed using spreadsheets. For years in which multiple measurements of water levels were taken for a single well, an annual average was calculated for the well. For each well, the average water level in the most recent year was then subtracted from the average water level in the first year for which data were available during the period, yielding a calculation of the change in groundwater levels. The analysis found that water levels fell in about 62 percent of the wells between 2000 and 2013, with many of the largest declines in the San Joaquin Valley and some areas of Southern California. Even with many wells lacking data for part of that 14-year period, the average drop in water levels among the declining wells was more than 15 feet. A total of 121 wells had large declines of 50 feet or more in their water levels.

62%of the state’s wells that dropped between 2000 and 2013 15+ feetThe average drop in water levels among the declining wells 121Wells, mostly in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, with water-

level declines of 50 feet or more. 40%of the state’s water supply is underground $45

billionValue of the California ag industry 20%

of the nation’s underground pumping takes place in the San

Joaquin Valley

About the project

In an investigation of groundwater depletion in California, Gannett newspapers in the state — The Desert Sun, the Visalia Times-Delta/Tulare Advance Register and The Salinas Californian — teamed up to collect data and analyze the problem. Data for 3,054 wells were obtained from a U.S. Geological Survey database, while records for 340 wells were provided by the Coachella Valley Water District and the Desert Water Agency. Learn more about how the project came together. Page 6A

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Water tables have been dropping sharply in places across California as farms and expanding suburbs pump vast quantities of water during successive dry years, taking a heavy toll on many of the state’s aquifers.

Measurements of water levels in wells throughout the state show that aquifers are being significantly depleted in many areas as more water is drained out than seeps back into the ground.

An analysis of groundwater data provided by the U.S. Geological Survey and two other agencies has found that, of 3,394 wells across the state, water levels declined in about 62 percent of the wells between 2000 and 2013.

Even with many wells lacking data for part of that 14-year period, the average drop in water levels among the declining wells was more than 15 feet. A total of 121 wells, mostly in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, had large declines of 50 feet or more in their water levels.

After California’s driest year on record and an abnormally dry decade, the pressures on groundwater — which accounts for about 40 percent of the state’s water supply — are increasing. Flows through rivers and canal systems have grown less reliable during the prolonged drought, diminishing the deliveries of water supplies that have traditionally sustained Central Valley farms and Southern California cities.

State and local officials have known about California’s chronic problem of groundwater depletion for decades, and in some areas have taken steps to combat the declines. The state’s history has been defined by more than a century of moving water to dry regions to defy the arid climate. But the continued downward trends in some aquifers reveal how California’s approach to managing groundwater has serious flaws and how, in many cases, officials charged with watching water supplies haven’t been able to get a grip on the problem.

Water scientists and some state policymakers have been calling for greater oversight of groundwater pumping, recommending that government agencies do a better job of tracking areas with critical problems and finding long-term solutions.

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Falling water levels carry with them a host of impacts and risks, including higher costs to pump from wells and drill new wells, diminishing water quality, sinking ground that has damaged homes, and threats to wilderness areas where plants and animals depend on ample groundwater.

In an investigation of groundwater depletion in California, Gannett newspapers in the state — The Desert Sun, the Visalia Times-Delta/Tulare Advance Register and The Salinas Californian — teamed up to collect data and interview those at the forefront of the problem, including farmers, well drillers, scientists and officials of water agencies.

The examination of three areas of the state revealed that declines in aquifers pose a variety of dilemmas depending on the region:

• On the coast, areas such as Monterey County are battling saltwater intrusion, which is caused by over-pumping and threatens to render some farmland unusable. Flows from rivers and reservoirs have been channeled to farming areas to try to diminish reliance on groundwater and keep at bay the seawater seeping into the freshwater aquifers.

• In the San Joaquin Valley near Visalia, farmers are seeing wells on the verge of going dry and are being forced to drill new, deeper wells to reach the receding waters. A recent U.S. Geological Survey report found that so much water has been drained in some areas of the San Joaquin Valley that the ground has sunk at rates of nearly 1 foot a year.

• In the Coachella Valley, groundwater levels have been declining over the years despite deliveries of imported Colorado River water. As water levels have fallen, the ground has sunk in some areas and damaged homes, leaving cracked foundations and buckled streets. New scientific research has also found that groundwater depletion has contributed to the deaths of mesquite trees in desert sand dunes, harming an increasingly rare ecosystem that normally provides an oasis for wildlife.

• Well measurements across the state show that areas with declines of more than 50 feet in water levels were spread across the state, from the Central Valley near Merced and Fresno to Southern California cities such as San Bernardino, Victorville and Beaumont.

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The effects of groundwater depletion are often invisible to most Californians. But the emerging impacts, if not adequately addressed, could eventually force controls on pumping in some areas and restrictions on development, and could threaten some of the state’s $45-billion-a-year agriculture industry. Eventually, experts say, areas where groundwater levels have fallen dramatically are likely to be forced to come up with water budgets that strike a balance between inflows of water and the quantities being pumped out.

The use of groundwater is largely unregulated in California. Compared to other Western states such as Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico, California offers more of a free-for-all situation in which irrigators can pump massive quantities without having anyone tell them they shouldn’t, said Michael Campana, a groundwater expert and professor at Oregon State University.

“The state needs to take some leadership, and I just haven’t seen that,” Campana said. He recalled that when he was a graduate student in the 1970s, his adviser pointed to the sinking ground in the San Joaquin Valley as “an egregious example of one state failing to take responsibility.” And he said that recent research showing the ground is still rapidly sinking suggests that key lessons haven’t been learned.

“Here we are 40-some years later, and they’re still doing the same thing. It’s like the classic definition of insanity,” Campana said. “We don’t pay as much attention to it until it’s too late, like your ground surface starts dropping, or your wells dry up or your springs dry up. It’s out of sight, out of mind. It’s very easy to ignore it until it’s too late.”

Drilling deeper

Wes Harmon’s phone has been ringing off the hook for the past six months. As a well driller in the remote San Joaquin Valley town of Riverdale, Harmon’s is the number growers reach for when their wells start to sputter and slow — and this year he’s been running from site to site. The next opening for just a little of Big River Drilling’s time, even just an estimate, is in March.

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“I don’t like to see this,” Harmon said. “The people who are suffering are the folks who don’t have the money to get their water anywhere else.”

Water normally flows down to the valley from the Sierra Nevada, feeding a vast labyrinth of canals. But farmers who rely on ditches fed by the Tulare Irrigation District had their water run out in August, the first time that’s happened since 1990. So, with valuable permanent crops in the ground like walnuts and almonds, many farmers had no choice but to turn on their pumps.

And that pumping has come with a price as water levels throughout the San Joaquin Valley are dropping. Last year alone, pumping in the Westlands Water District totaled 355,000 acre-feet, enough water to fill Hetch Hetchy, the reservoir that supplies the city of San Francisco.

As a result, groundwater levels dropped an average of 48 feet along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, according to Westlands’ data.

For many farmers, that means spending more than $10,000 to drill an agricultural well to a deeper level, often an additional 400 to 500 feet. Water levels in the San Joaquin Valley vary widely, from about 50 feet to 1,200 feet.

And as water levels fall, farmers are being forced to spend more on power bills to run their pumps or upgrade their pumps to add more horsepower.

“There’s too many straws in the hole,” Harmon said. “You can spend thousands of dollars chasing water — and drilling as many wells as you want — but that’s not going to make the situation any better.”

Scientists estimate that the Central Valley accounts for about 20 percent of the groundwater that is pumped in the nation. It’s the lifeblood of the flourishing agriculture industry, producing crops from almonds to plums, nectarines and cotton.

So much water is used to irrigate the crops of the Central Valley that its aquifers have been losing groundwater at an estimated rate of more than 3 cubic kilometers each year. Hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, a UC Irvine professor who together with NASA researchers has studied the region, has calculated that over a decade, the amounts of groundwater extracted would be just about enough to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.

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As the water is drained from the aquifers, spaces remain deep in the soil. The ground can collapse, causing the land surface to sink. It’s been a problem for decades in the San Joaquin Valley, and from 1926 to 1970, researchers calculated that some areas saw declines of up to 28 feet.

Until recently, water managers thought the problem had been somewhat alleviated by imported supplies of water. But last month, the USGS released a report showing that in one area of the San Joaquin Valley, the ground sank 21 inches in two years.

Researchers had initially been studying places along the Delta-Mendota Canal, but they found the most pronounced subsidence in another area to the northeast.

“Those are among the fastest rates ever measured in the San Joaquin Valley, even in the ’50s and ’60s,” said Michelle Sneed, a USGS hydrologist and lead author of the study. “The location was surprising, the rate was probably the most surprising, and it was such a large area, too.”

The sinking area spread across 1,200 square miles near the town of El Nido, where groundwater levels have hit historic lows as increasing amounts of water have been pumped from the ground. Farming practices have had an impact as farmers have been increasingly converting row crops to permanent crops such as almond orchards, which need year-round watering.

The settling ground will mean higher infrastructure costs in the Central Valley in the future. Engineers planning California’s high-speed rail system will have to take sinking ground into account, and the declining land detected in the study is also near the main flood control channel on the east side of the San Joaquin River.

“A rate of nearly a foot a year is going to impact how that channel is able to move floodwaters away,” Sneed said.

“It already has cost millions of dollars for various agencies, and it’s expected to cost millions more in the future,” Sneed said.

“But the real trick is monitoring because if you don’t have the measurements, then you don’t really know what you’re engineering against either. So that, I think, is a problem. We don’t have any continuous measurements in that area that are really capturing what’s going on. And there’s a lot of other places in the San Joaquin Valley we should be doing the same thing, but we’re not. It’s a tough financial climate.”

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Sinking ground

State officials say they are taking steps to gradually improve monitoring of water levels, and one area of particular focus is the San Joaquin Valley, which has some of the biggest rates of depletion in the state. A draft of the latest California Water Plan Update, produced by the Department of Water Resources, shows some of the highest rates of depletion as blotches of red and orange across the Tulare Lake basin, reflecting declines in water levels of 20 feet or more from 2005 to 2010.

While the San Joaquin Valley faces the worst problems of land subsidence, other regions of California are dealing with similar problems on a smaller scale.

In the Coachella Valley, the ground has sunk in some places where groundwater levels have fallen. Uneven settling has cracked the foundations of houses and fractured walls, swimming pools and roads.

In the affluent development PGA West in La Quinta, where neighborhoods wrap around lush golf courses, property managers started hearing about problems in some homes in the early 1990s.

Michael Walker, general manager of the PGA West Residential Association, remembers seeing one home at that time where the tiles had popped off the floor at odd angles.

“We thought that was a construction defect. But eventually, we saw it in some other units and figured out that it was from slab movement,” Walker said. In the following years, various other homes developed similar cracks, and the homeowners association fixed them.

The association also sued the builders, eventually obtaining a settlement that has helped pay for repairs. Walker said that after studying the causes, he and others have concluded that the area’s geology is a factor, in addition to declines in the aquifer.

“When the aquifer goes down, everything slowly creeps down to it,” said Steve Herthel, reconstruction manager for the residential association. “You can’t do much about the soil settling. You just have to figure out a way to deal with it.”

Stopping on an otherwise impeccable street lined with lawns and flower gardens, Herthel pointed out a cracked curb at the base of a driveway. “This is going to be repaired because it’s a hazard,” he said.

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On another street, yellow tape and construction signs mark an intersection where workers are repairing a stretch of concrete gutter where a depression had formed.

A decade ago, Walker was dealing with more expensive problems, including a swimming pool that had partly sunk, an artificial lake that had shifted and was draining, and homes with interior cracks.

“We have repaired those to a point that we don’t believe we are going to see any further damage to those units,” Walker said.

Several years ago, Walker was dealing with multiple damaged homes. But in the past three years, he said, no additional houses have needed interior repairs.

It’s not clear why there are fewer reports of damage nowadays at PGA West, but it could be that the Coachella Valley Water District’s efforts to boost groundwater levels are helping the area. In the past three years, increased flows from the Colorado River have been routed to the water agency’s replenishment ponds in La Quinta, boosting nearby water levels.

The USGS has been studying sinking ground in the Coachella Valley for years in conjunction with the local water district. In a 2007 USGS study, researchers determined that the ground had subsided up to 4 inches in parts of La Quinta, with smaller effects in parts of Palm Desert and Indian Wells, during a year-and-a-half period from 2003 to 2005.

As water levels have risen near the ponds in the past few years, Sneed said, that change has arrested the sinking of the ground in some places in and around La Quinta.

The higher water levels in that portion of the Coachella Valley show that efforts to recharge the aquifer are paying off, said Steve Bigley, the Coachella Valley Water District’s director of environmental services. “We’re seeing a shift in the subsidence that we’ve been seeing there for the last 20 years as a result of the replenishment.”

Such problems haven’t been eliminated, though. Water levels have dropped more than 30 feet since 2000 beneath portions of other cities, including Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert.

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Sinking ground has damaged homes in various areas, triggering multiple lawsuits against builders.

Lawyer Robert Gilliland, Jr., has handled two such cases, both of which ended in settlements for his clients.

“Some of the homes had significant damage. It looked like something out of the Northridge Earthquake, where you had cracks right through the slab and cracks right through the drywall,” Gilliland said. In one of his cases several years ago, he represented four homeowners.

“If it’s one home, it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if it’s a project of many homes, it could cost millions of dollars in repairs,” Gilliland said.

Ron Green, a Palm Desert lawyer, said he has handled about a dozen such cases in the Coachella Valley in the past decade.

“La Quinta has been a big source, south Palm Desert is a big source, Indian Wells is a big source of these problems,” Green said.

However, several real estate agents who work in those cities said when asked about land subsidence that they had never dealt with such a problem. No public agency is tracking reports of damage due to sinking ground.

In many cases, Green said, homeowners don’t even know they have a problem until cracks break through the surface of the flooring.

“For those that buy a high-end home and find it cracking in half, it’s alarming because they’re really going to be the victim of a symptom of a much bigger problem,” Green said. “It is a global valley issue that would require substantial intercity coordination, management along with the water district to try to develop a comprehensive plan.”

And given the complexity of the problem, Green said, “there’s just not a quick, simple solution to it, and I think in the meantime, the effects are still going to be getting worse and not better.”

Fighting Saltwater

Near the coast in Monterey County, water officials have been trying for years to protect coastal aquifers from the intrusion of seawater, which threatens farms as well as the area’s drinking water.

Justin Brown, a flower bulb grower, has watched the water quality deteriorate on leased land at the Elkhorn Slough for the past decade. The groundwater became so bad that his company was forced to break a lease with its landlord, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

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Freshwater wells in northern Monterey County, including the Salinas area, have been in a state of overdraft for decades, allowing seawater to seep inland.

Brown, chief operations officer for Golden State Bulb Growers, said when the company first leased the land adjacent to the slough, the water quality was passable. But eventually the wells were contaminated with saltwater. Chemical tests confirmed the signs of trouble that farmers had already noticed in the plants.

Data provided by the Monterey County Water Resources Agency show that saltwater intrusion has reached near the city limits of Salinas.

An estimated 9,000 acre-feet of groundwater a year — about 2.9 billion gallons — is being contaminated by saltwater, creating a problem for the farming community and threatening the drinking water supplies of Salinas, Marina, Fort Ord and Castroville, according to the Monterey County Water Resources Agency.

Castroville is now planted almost exclusively in artichokes because the plant is one of the most resistant crops to higher levels of salinity in the water. Strawberries, in contrast, are harmed by high salt levels that can stunt the plants’ growth and lead to smaller crop yields.

Starting in the 1940s, over-pumping from wells near the coast lowered the freshwater levels and seawater began to move inland.

In an effort to decrease pumping in recent years, the Salinas Valley Water Project was formed and the county water agency has sought to provide farmers with other sources of water to irrigate their crops.

Starting two years ago, water from the Salinas River has been caught at a diversion dam and mixed with treated effluent from a sewer plant near the mouth of the river in Marina. The water is diverted for much of the year, except in certain periods when steelhead trout are running.

That blended water is then pumped through a series of pipes to an area of farmland covering 12,000 acres where the heaviest pumping was occurring. The inflows of water mean that far less water is pumped from the ground, reducing the stress on the coastal aquifers.

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Water is also being released from Lake Nacimiento, providing a flow that leaches down through the sandy soils of the river and reaches the sponge-like spaces in the ground that make up the aquifer.

Water officials say their latest data indicate that progress has been made in slowing the advance of seawater.

The data are collected by lowering instruments into wells to capture the water levels in relationship to sea level, said Robert Johnson, assistant general manager of the Water Resources Agency. Based on monitoring of wells across the valley, three out of five geographical areas have seen water levels increase during the past two years, while one area has showed continued declines.

Water agency maps chart the so-called “zero level,” where aquifer levels are at sea level, and since 2009, that line has retreated from some wells that were in danger of being contaminated.

Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, said that based on the latest data, the situation appears to be improving and he is “cautiously optimistic.”

Elsewhere in the state, officials in coastal cities of Southern California have been using wells to inject freshwater and block the intrusion of saltwater. In Orange County, purified recycled water is routed both to ponds where the water settles into the ground and to coastal wells, which are used as a barrier to keep the saltwater at bay.

Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, said coastal aquifers in urban areas of Southern California now appear to be in better shape because of the use of such injection wells.

Disputes over groundwater in California have often landed in court, and a total of 23 groundwater basins have been adjudicated, requiring greater oversight. Most of the groundwater basins are in Southern California, including Beaumont, Chino and Tehachapi.

The Seaside basin, which underlies a 19-square-mile area adjacent to Monterey Bay, was adjudicated in 2006 in a decision that declared the aquifer in overdraft and ordered dramatic cutbacks in pumping to achieve a “natural safe yield.”

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To the south in Paso Robles, controversy erupted this year over a growing wine industry’s impact on the water supply. Some residents demanded controls on pumping after some wells ran dry. In some areas, officials determined that water levels dropped 25 feet in two years. San Luis Obispo County supervisors responded in August by passing an ordinance establishing a moratorium on new or expanded irrigation for crops, and on new development dependent on a well.

Lund said similar disputes could be looming in the Tulare Lake basin as water levels plummet. “There’s just a lot of over-pumping, and it’s only a matter of time until it has to end, and there will probably be a lot of lawsuits along the way.”

Managing groundwater

Some water experts have described California’s widespread lack of controls on groundwater pumping as a sort of “Wild West” situation that naturally leads to falling water tables.

But at the Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District, senior engineer Larry Dotson bristles when he hears critics say that nothing is being done about groundwater depletion. Dotson’s job is to keep tabs on water delivered in the 340,000-acre district covering two cities and a 50-mile swath of the southeastern San Joaquin Valley.

“Everyone thinks they know what’s best when it comes to water,” Dotson said. “The district was formed in 1927 with the sole intent of conserving water. It’s been the purpose from the start.”

The area’s groundwater supplies have been in overdraft for decades, with more pumped out than has been flowing in. The water agency started tracking groundwater levels in the 1970s and a series of conservation plans followed.

The district has calculated that in the 1970s, groundwater demands were exceeding supplies by about 100,000 acre-feet per year. Since then, as more outside water supplies have flowed in, the shortfall has decreased to an estimated 40,000 acre-feet on average. But aquifer levels have been dropping more quickly recently as farmers’ use of wells has increased to compensate for the lack of surface water.

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Lately, Dotson said, the dry weather has been a dominant factor. “The crux of the matter is that it’s a dynamic system.”

Trying to lessen the problem, the city of Visalia this year started accepting bids for a $150 million sewage treatment plant for its 127,000 residents that would send recycled water back into canals bound for nearby cotton fields. It’s the largest public works project in the city’s history.

Elsewhere, on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley, water managers and farm owners are spending millions of dollars to lobby heavily for the state’s $25 billion plan to build two water tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Echoing the positions of Southern California water agencies, proponents of the plan in the Central Valley say the Delta tunnels would make water supplies more reliable and go a long way toward alleviating their water shortages.

The joint federal and state Bay Delta Conservation Plan also calls for restoring and protecting more than 100,000 acres of habitat, including marshes and grasslands. But the plan faces strong opposition from critics who say the tunnels would end up harming the Delta ecosystem and wouldn’t fix the state’s water problems.

State officials, meanwhile, have increasingly been talking about trying to better manage groundwater.

In the newly released California Water Action Plan, state officials laid out a list of broad goals, including alleviating water scarcity and confronting declines in groundwater. The document acknowledges that “much of California’s groundwater is not sustainably managed,” and that as a result, groundwater levels have been declining. It recommends remedies such as promoting local conservation ordinances and allocating more water to help recharge aquifers.

Separately, the State Water Resources Control Board this year released a draft of a groundwater plan with recommendations, including goals such as “sustainable thresholds,” more monitoring and assessment of groundwater levels, funding, oversight and enforcement.

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Increasingly, state officials have agreed with water scientists who have been clamoring for better monitoring and more comprehensive and accessible groundwater data.

“We would all benefit from better statewide information, and I think we’re on the verge of that,” said Eric Oppenheimer, director of the water board’s offices of research and planning.

Oppenheimer pointed out that the state lacks up-to-date regional assessments of trends in aquifer levels, and that one report documenting which groundwater basins are in “critical overdraft” hasn’t been updated since 1980.

In 2009, the Legislature amended the state water code to require a statewide program to monitor groundwater levels.

In response, the Department of Water Resources has been developing an online database through a program known as California Statewide Groundwater Elevation Monitoring, or CASGEM. The database, however, remains difficult to navigate.

Pulling together such data, which traditionally have been archived by different agencies and in different formats, is challenging, said Famiglietti of UC Irvine.

“It’s very difficult to put together a comprehensive picture of what’s happening with groundwater storage because of that problem,” said Famiglietti, director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. “There are data there, but they’re not easily accessible. And I think the agencies recognize that, and they’re working on it, but it would be very, very nice if we could just click on a point on a map and get the local groundwater levels.”

He said it’s a software problem as well as an institutional problem, and that the state also needs more measurements of water levels. “We really need to be monitoring how much groundwater we’re using, and we’re not really there yet.”

Sneed agreed there are significant gaps in the data, as shown by the surprising discovery of rapid sinking of the ground in the Central Valley.

“The implications really are we need to pay attention. We need to not just initiate these studies when there are droughts and under a crisis sort of scenario. We need to be paying a little bit of attention all the time,” Sneed said. “If we have some idea of what’s going on, we can do something about it sooner.”

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Famiglietti has long criticized the state’s traditional approach to groundwater, but he said he sees signs that state officials may be willing to rethink their policies.

“California is now recognizing the need for statewide and regional, sub-statewide, some kind of management strategy within the state,” Famiglietti said. “Hopefully we’ve turned a corner.”

It’s unclear what steps water managers might take to step up oversight or regulation in areas with severe declines.

Gary Bardini, deputy director of the Department of Water Resources, said his agency is emphasizing management of groundwater at the regional level, and is providing support to local agencies. He said regional planning has brought successes and that each region faces different challenges.

He denied that falling water levels in the Central Valley and Southern California are a reflection of failed policies, saying there are three main causes recently: dry conditions; decreased water deliveries from the north to the south; and, in farming regions, a shift to more permanent crops such as orchards of nut trees.

“All those things have created essentially what we see as the recent change in groundwater,” Bardini said. “Because of all these variabilities, we’re really stressing that we need to have stronger regional efforts.”

He added: “I think the question really is, do we need to give additional tools to the locals?” In a recent state survey, Bardini said, a large number of local agencies said funding limits such efforts.

Some say the state, while working with local agencies, also needs more funding for comprehensive research and monitoring of groundwater. Tim Parker, a Sacramento-based groundwater consultant, noted that the main role of the Department of Water Resources has traditionally been moving water and supplying it to water districts, and that the agency has had relatively little funding to study groundwater.

“They need to have a pot of money to help do the groundwater studies that need to be done,” Parker said. “To me, the state’s role is to compile the statewide picture on groundwater and to assist local agencies that need help managing groundwater resources locally.”

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At a recent conference of the Association of California Water Agencies in Los Angeles, many discussions focused on groundwater. One session, for instance, was titled: “Local Groundwater Management and the State: At a Crossroads?”

The organization, which has a membership of about 440 public agencies, has been advocating local control of groundwater, saying local water districts are best able to come up with solutions, said Craig Ewing, vice president of the Palm Springs-based Desert Water Agency.

“I think the state’s initial interest, from what indications I’ve heard, is that they want the locals to have the opportunity to solve the problem,” Ewing said. He said the Coachella Valley’s water agencies, with decades of experience using imported water to replenish the aquifer, may be able to help other regions that are just starting to confront such problems.

Despite the deliveries of water from the Colorado River, groundwater levels in the Coachella Valley have declined over the years as heavy pumping has drawn out water for golf courses, resorts and farms.

Records provided earlier this year by the Desert Water Agency and the Coachella Valley Water District show that the average depth of wells fell from 104 feet in 1970 to 159 feet this year, an average loss of 55 feet.

Across the state, water managers are increasingly trying to bank water in aquifers during wet periods to weather droughts. Depleted aquifers offer storage space, but one overarching question remains: whether California can find a long-term balance between the amounts flowing in and the amounts pumped out.